Women are washing clothes in the water I was going to swim in. One in an old marathon t-shirt (Fort Lauderdale, 2007) belly laughs and they are all speaking Maya. Don’t they know to speak Spanish in Guatemala? Don’t they know this lake is sacred? That the god of a volcano blasted it into existence — surely in conspiracy with a more watery god — ? They should know this better than I do. Instead they scrub their Western clothes and their local clothes together on rocks along the shore.
By all accounts I’m supposed to like it better when the little man with brown hat and brown shirt and brown skin and presumably brown pants and shoes paddles by with his one paddle in his brown boat. He makes no wake in the water so he doesn’t splash my book, gets no water on the 17th secret in the list of the secrets of the jaguar. They should build this dock better to keep the waves off my book. These speedboats are out of control.
Yesterday Dino said we will see the volcano better from the other side of the lake. He seems unaware that the volcano is a god but he has lots of information like the bit about the view. In the street Dino regales us with restaurant recommendations and reviews citing hotels for bedbugs. He does this solemnly, serenely. His serenity persists as tuktuks barrel toward his bowed forehead, intelligently aglow in the light blue pastel of a man imbibing the world’s collective knowledge. The tuktuks dodge him. We watch his feet guide his body, vaguely but deftly navigating with only his peripheral vision and the definite truths of the blue pastel glow. Hail the megalibrary of one to five stars, lightly monetized and presumably selling our current location to enrich a human name somewhere in California. Hail a cool room and a hot shower and clean sheets, though I will be mentioning the lukewarm Nescafé situation of the morning.
Once, in the time before the truths of the megalibrary, a book series called Lonely Planet dominated the lives of Western travelers. It provided just enough information to get you out into the world with an idea of what to see and where to stay, but there weren’t really pictures and it was always out of date. People like my parents would show up at the listed address but, because their copy was from 1975 and this was 1981, the hostel was closed and of course it was raining. You will not catch me reminiscing about the Lonely Planet as if this were a podcast. Those were not better days when the bedbugs were a surprise. When it was impossible to determine in advance which town had the color scheme most appropriate for the meager wardrobe in that generation’s much heavier packs—algodon—no, that was not a better time. The point I plan to make is about the name of the Lonely Planet series and exactly what they meant to describe as lonely.
Sometime circa 1970 the consciousness hit America and presumably the world that Earth spins solitarily in a vast universe. The Mayans knew this long before we did—see the Codex of Dresden. And yes, we managed to name the greatest surviving document of a 7,000-year-old culture after a town in Deutschland. And of course, a man named Galileo had alerted Western culture to earth’s marginal position, but the first guy is never really heard (think Leif Erikson), plus Americans require pictures. Only a famous photo could capture the idea of our planet as first The Blue Marble and later The Pale Blue Dot. Our parents would have seen it on the cover of Time magazine. I saw it thanks to a college professor. Point is that one of the astronauts going up on an early space mission turned around and took a photo of the whole earth from an appropriate artistic-scientific distance. So much for Creation!
Hippies subsequently graced us with The Whole Earth catalog for building rammed earth houses and buying DIY solar power tools and understanding our infinitesimal existence in this stupendous foreverness, but this, too, lasted only briefly. Soon a barrage of satellites chased any last shreds of peace or God from the space immediately surrounding earth. It was in the crook of this sudden transition, the little part of the graph where you are supposed to invest before the stocks all go bananas, that our Don Quixote emerged: the Lonely Planet series. It said, IF THE WORLD IS SO SMALL, THEN YOU CAN SEE THE WORLD.
But I must confess first my supreme annoyance, as the local residents are supplanting my slick location here on the rocks of the shore. A couple of them throw crab traps in the nearby water and the buoys are not even made of sticks or feathers, it’s just some old milk cartons like we have in the States floating above the traps. One man ties a fishing lure and they all seem to have cellphones. It’s like those kids in New Orleans, great capital of jazz, who have the audacity to play loud hip hop on Frenchman Street while I write my literature. This old man is fishing with a rod-and-reel setup while a boy unwraps a lollipop and takes a video of the lake where nothing is happening, and from this side, no less, with no view of the volcano. I can’t tell what they are talking about but my guess is it’s not the birds or an ancient calendar.
Finally a man with his long hair in a bun swims out into the lake, proof that it can still be done despite the pollution running down from the streets and concrete houses and the laundry. He bobs around in the water, kicking his feet. He must be privy to the old ways. Perhaps he rejects the evangelical churches and the catholic deities scattered around the party village.
I’m watching him and thinking he’d be nice to meet when you come out through the door and ask me if I’m going to swim. I say yes. And, in a timely fashion, the Mayans that were sitting by the water get up to vacate the good spot to jump in.
Because Dino has expressed an unwillingness to enter the lake, the question of its sanitary condition hovers in the air. “I did my internet research” you say, and you just plan to not submerge your head. While we walk to the water, a blue hummingbird—and as we know you are also a hummingbird—dips its probuscus into a dangling array of moonlike blue flowers, hovering at each flower to fulfill its role in the mutual. The role of the lunar flower being to dangle in the sun.
This morning, you say, you found a cucaracha en tus calcetines. We will have to mention this to Dino, as well as the Nescafé.
“Three, two, one,” says you as we dive forward off the rock and into the blue water which is exactly as warm as a human body. You didn’t sleep so much because the power of the lake, you say, woke you up at 2am. The surface of the lake separates the water from the air. The substance of the lake accumulates everything inside these mountains. Briefly, it accumulates us.
While we’re in the water you say you imagine that Switzerland looks like this. Huge steep summits completely encircle the lake, formerly a caldera, and plunge from the blue sky into the blue water. I talk about the Rocky Mountains and the Switzerland of America, the Million Dollar Highway, my mouth ever compelled to dangle guidebook facts about quantities of snowfall and dates of infrastructure that are exaggerated and should not be revisited on Wikipedia for the sake of my reputation as a generous, careful person.
A young man, younger than us now, drifts over in a small boat. With a hook he pulls up crab traps. He has done this before. Of course I like to think he has done this for seven thousand years. That he is a line of Central American Josephs stretching back into the fogs of time when volcanoes earned their reputations.
Inspecting the contents, he tosses the little ones and some plastic by-catch back into the water, where both will grow. I feel a flotsam candy wrapper touch my hand. You have a strand of hair in your mouth that you don’t want to remove with your wet hand because the water is not to enter your mouth.
Reportedly the number of satellites drifting around our lonely pale planet has multiplied badly in our lifetimes. Space junk routinely collides with more important space assets, causing millions of dollars in damages. If the lights all turned off and we could see the stars again, perhaps they would still be a little dimmer for the cloud of satellites drifting around between our home and the crowded universe beyond.
Reportedly the Mayan calendar so famous for its cosmological precision included also twenty zodiac signs. Yours, the hummingbird, inspired the design of the satellite. At some point, engineers hovered over the array of animals capable of combining motion and rest—that bird, plus the dragonfly, and a few others I imagine must exist but i cant think of—and derived their vision for the titanium jetsam we know today. Who knows what creature Man consulted in designing Dino’s glowing phone screen.
“We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten… But our exiled spirits can tell. Deep in our bones resides an ancient, singing couple who just won’t give up making their beautiful, wild noise. The world won’t end if we can find them.”
These are the last words from the Secret Jaguar book that a man also from the Rockies named Martin wrote while he trained to become a Mayan shaman at this lake. We have talked about this person and his book for a couple of days. A Galileo to us, as we approached the same lake for our photographic proof.
We tread water.
“They don’t want us swimming because they don’t want us to free the couple dancing inside us”. You say this jokingly and I suspect you’re right.
When we do get out of the water you ask if I prefer oceans or lakes. I don’t like your question because I don’t have preferences, never have I really been opinionated, clearly, but after some consideration I loyally say lake and you say ocean which is a good reflection of our dynamic. But then you update the page, redesign the whole premise of this web-based personality quiz you’ve posed. You say that you much prefer pools. “But I don’t want to prefer them” says you, because “they’re artificial”. Feeling inspired I reply “it’s all the world”. Which can also be said about the cucaracha in your calcetines, a violation of the laws that must separate nature and Man, decreeing that clothes should be washed in water from a pipe by an electric machine in this time of satellites.
Boats that serve as buses skirt the edges of the lake, motors roaring as they bounce on waves caused, says Dino, by Pacific heat borne on a wind. A small woman in perfect local vestments sells us a story that the dyes used to turn cotton blue come from the famous indigo flower. Unlike the blue flower I already mentioned, this flower looks purple. But it makes cotton, the fruit of yet another flower, blue. And she sells us the further detail that the indigo flower, when picked under the full moon, produces a dark blue, but when picked under a new moon it makes a dye that’s the color of the sky. How lonely can a planet be when it has a moon so strong it turns the things of this world into different colors?
As you have gathered, the planet isn’t the one feeling alone. We are the lonely ones, afloat under the stars and the satellites, protecting our expectations here and there on boats and buses on a journey we purchased with intent to enjoy. We have traveled all this way—me and you and every person in a rented bed—me and you and every Joseph and every Maria and even Dino and every cotton seed plucked out seven thousand times between harvests in formation of a culture or another culture—and the lake of both blues accumulates it all.
Skookum Atlas 